


Embrace or Exorcise

by magikfanfic



Category: Runaways (Comics), Runaways (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Mutual Pining, admission of feelings, anxiety mentions, mentions of sexual situations, self-esteem mentions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-11
Updated: 2018-01-11
Packaged: 2019-03-03 08:11:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13337043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magikfanfic/pseuds/magikfanfic
Summary: Gert Yorkes is soft for two people and one dinosaur now. This addition doesn’t break her; it only makes her better.





	Embrace or Exorcise

**Author's Note:**

> More comic and TV canon twisted into one thing. More admissions because I live for them. One day maybe I'll get tired of them but probably not.

It’s not that Gert doesn’t like the Hostel, but it does a number on her anxiety just by existing. By all rhyme and reason, it shouldn’t. It shouldn’t still be habitable when it has managed to sink so far into the ground. The lights shouldn’t continue to work, and neither should the plumbing. The rooms should be full of dirt and bugs and probably other animals and vegetation. Standing water should be everywhere. It should be unstable, constantly threatening to send them sliding to their deaths into a precipice. The fact that it should be all of these things and yet seems to be none of them distresses her on so many levels. She keeps waking up in the middle of the night, short of breath, waiting for the walls to crumble around them, for the floor to collapse, for the ceiling to crash down full of rock to suffocate them. 

None of it happens.

But that doesn’t matter because the scenario plays itself out each and every night in her mind. Bright flashes of color that make sense. And Gert plots their way out of all of them. Every worst case scenario that she can think of, she writes down, works until she has an escape plan for it. Sometimes the escape plan comes with casualties. It’s just the way things work, but then she will sort through it, do it over again until she has minimized even those, until two deaths turns into two not quite fatal injuries. It’s supposed to help her sleep, but it doesn’t. Very little helps her sleep because every time she closes her eyes, all she can hear is the way the building is settling around them, all she can think about is it continuing its downward shift into the earth until one day they just can’t get out anymore. 

This is a fist that wraps around her stomach, her heart, her lungs, her throat so that she wakes up gasping, crying silently, terrified to even make a sound because what if that’s the catalyst that sends all of them hurtling into the darkness, trapped, lost forever. They ran away. There was no other choice. They ran away, they fled down the alley and into the night and into the hills. They found the mansion that they had once read about on the internet and scrambled into it to hide. Gert doesn’t understand why they’re still here, but when she starts talking about why it’s a bad idea everyone looks at her with eyes that are too wide, mouths that are pressed tight, and then she knows that they think she’s spiraling.

Her anxiety is better with Old Lace around, but she is still without her medication. She is stuck in an impossibly stressful situation wherein her mind will not let her rest, and maybe she is spiraling with some of it some of the time, but that doesn’t discount the fact that this is dangerous. This is dangerous, and they need to find something else to do, somewhere else to be. Even if this saves them money. Even if this keeps them off the radar.

Gert has read about people who have died gasping for air. Gert remembers the story about the man who cut his own arm off to escape the boulder that trapped him. At night, when she can’t sleep, she mentally goes through their provisions, tries to remember where everything is in case they need to get to something quickly. Sometimes, when the others don’t notice, she will repack their belongings when they get a little too comfortable. No one chastises her, but she can see the annoyance in their eyes. Not all of them, of course. Molly, with her quiet understanding, will just take her hand and press into the side of her, full body contact that has always helped, and Chase looks at her like he wants to sweep everything that hurts her away with one touch of his hand, but he doesn’t; Gert doesn’t understand why, and she hasn’t been able to ask. It’s mostly Nico and Alex who look annoyed when Gert gets too keyed up. Karo will sit with her in quiet spaces and ask Gert to tell her the names of every animal that was in the Yorkes lab. Part of her would find it patronizing from anyone else, but it’s Karolina so Gert does it, and it helps.

Old Lace never leaves her side when it’s the worst. Just lingers beside her, a calming, huge physical reminder that there is something to protect her always. Even if Old Lace can’t sort out the worst of the fears and the dangers, the ones that exist inside of her mind. 

There are things that help: making lists, talking through the situation and the solutions, pacing, finding something else to do that will occupy her hands and her mind, wandering through the Hostel at night while everyone sleeps and checking the objects she has strategically placed in order to assure herself that they are not slowly sinking further into the ground, disappearing bit by bit until there is nothing left, until there is no way out of the situation for any of them. Her meds would help, but there is no way for them to get ahold of those anymore. Part of her likes to spend some of the time at night when she is making her rounds chastising herself for rushing off without the pills, even though she knows it does little good. It happened. It is a thing that happened. It is a thing that is in the past, and it does her little good to dwell on it, but she can’t help it, can’t stop herself.

That’s another thing it makes her do, dwell, and there is a lot for Gert Yorkes, who barely forgets anything ever at all, to dwell on. 

Her brain, of course, has a few favorites. The slowly sinking, sure to kill them in the middle of the night when they least expect it might be at the top of the list, but it’s not the only greatest hit. The fact that they have been accused of kidnapping Molly, of murdering Destiny is on there too. In some ways, Gert agrees with those charges because while they did not play a part in Destiny’s murder they were cognizant of what happened and sat on it. If they had not done that, maybe this would not be their reality. Maybe Molly would be with family, safe, secure, and Gert would be. She doesn’t know. In the system, she assumes, but at least Molly would be somewhere approaching safe.

And then there’s the part of her that won’t, can’t, stop thinking of Chase. Of his hands. Of his mouth. Of what he said. How he held her with something close to reverence. Of his eyes sparking. And then how they fell after. When she said it was a one-time thing. The way his face crumpled all the way in, itself almost as disastrous a motion as what she imagines it would be if the walls around them folded. 

They have not talked about it. Not really. Not the way they probably should, and part of that is simply because she has been avoiding it, avoiding that truth that clenches her throat as tight as her anxiety. And part of it is because she thinks, knows, thinks that Chase is waiting for her to speak, waiting for her to lead. Normally she would be completely for that but this, now. It’s hard to make decisions, it’s hard to make a stand and properly formulate her words when her mind keeps butting in with the worst case scenarios it can fathom, when each day, little by little, her own brain convinces her that anything she has to say isn’t good enough, that no one will listen.

Stress has always made it worse, and this situation is a pile of stressors built on a certifiably shaky foundation. Gert likes solid ground. Gert likes knowing things. This feels like being trapped in a funhouse where the floor is constantly moving below her and none of the walls are real. She puts her hands out to catch herself and nothing solid is there to touch so she falls. She falls forever.

It’s four in the morning, and she’s quietly moving through the halls in the entirely too large Hanukkah sweater that comes down to her knees and covers her hands if she doesn’t keep pushing the sleeves back. Chase brought it back from the thrift store for her with the kind of shy smile on his face that meant he was thinking of her, and while it took everything inside of Gert to keep her giant, sarcastic mouth shut about what a monstrosity it was, she managed, and kept it because Chase. Because Chase. Which has gotten to the point where it’s enough of an answer for so many things in the same way that some things are only answered with because Molly or because Old Lace.

Because Chase.

Gert has been used to being soft for one person. For one person and a dinosaur. And now it looks like she’s going to be expanding that to two people and a dinosaur. By rights, it should be the dinosaur part of this equation that concerns her the most, but it’s not. It’s the lacrosse player shaped one that does. The guy she’s known as long as she has known anyone, longer than she has known Molly simply because of the fact that Chase is the oldest of them. Chase who is so much more than he pretends to be. Chase who is equally just as smart-mouthed as she is, which is just as attractive as his face. Chase who melts, visibly, when he looks at her now that she has started to notice. And Gert. Is not that. Is not outwardly affectionate most of the time. Is probably not soft enough for him, to be good for him. No, she is more likely to strike out with her defense mechanisms, let her tongue attempt to keep him at least three feet away from her at all times, even though he doesn’t care, curls next to her when they sleep in huddles, holds her hand in the gentlest way possible, every damn time.

Gert wants this, but she doesn’t know if she has done anything anywhere near good enough to deserve it.

Even if it isn’t quite an actual thing yet. Even if it only exists in one night of lips and hands and hurried, rushed, wonderful sex and then an aftermath that has been about as subtle as tumbling down a very long set of stairs with her hands full of copper pots.

A one time thing, she had said, as though by letting the words roll off her tongue she could somehow undo what feels like literal years counting how many times he looks at her and whether he speaks to her and wondering what it would be like if he called her, if he confided in her again the way that he used to when they were young, when he would twine his fingers around her own when she was scared. Chase was always the first of them to offer physical comfort. When someone fell, when someone cried, it was always his hand reaching out, and it still is, especially with her, although he catches himself. She has seen him catch himself. She has watched the moment that his fingers flex and then recede like he thinks they wouldn’t be welcome, like he worries she would bat them away.

Sometimes at night, she can still feel them, his fingers, branded across her skin. It’s not a bad thing at all except that it only happened once. It’s not a bad thing except that it makes something inside of her, some chasm that she thinks she could scream into for the rest of her life and never manage to fill, open, raw and needing something that Gert isn’t sure she can even understand except that it has a name and that name is Chase Stein.

It doesn’t seem fair for one person to be haunted by so many things, she thinks, as she wanders the halls, checking on each little security item that she has placed. It’s especially not fair when one of those would be so easy to pull into the light of day and deal with, embrace or exorcise. At least in her head, it’s as simple as that. She has been through the conversation at least eighteen times since they crawled through the doors, dropped to the floors, spread themselves across this liminal space where they exist inside and outside of time itself, part of reality but to the left. No matter how she frames it, though, no matter how many times she rehearses, it doesn’t seem right. She never manages to capture Chase’s voice, can never make the look in his eyes match the words she thinks he will say.

At a loss, she has let it go, put it aside, one more stressor to deal with later when everything is stable.

Nothing is stable, that’s the whole point of this mansion, swiftly tilted such that Molly likes to let marbles loose on one end and wait for them to reach the other. It happens slowly rather than all at once. It happens slowly. Like falling in love with your best friend. Like losing faith in your parents. It happens slowly. Like building trust on shaky ground.

It’s four in the morning, and if she keeps walking then in two hours Karo will be up to start the day by attempting to cajole the rest of them into yoga and weird protein shakes made with frozen fruit and oatmeal because they can’t actually afford protein powder, but Gert knows how to make yogurt so they use that even if Karo sometimes makes a face because she can’t exactly be vegan anymore. They have learned that a lot of things they used to be are not sustainable now, and it’s okay. It has to be. But Gert doesn’t think she can deal with having perky, sunshine, happy Karo forced on her first thing in the morning when it still isn’t technically tomorrow because she hasn’t been to bed yet so she finishes her rounds, making sure all of the items are still where they should be before making the slow trek back to her room. 

Only her feet don’t take her there. They take her to Chase’s room, and his door is cracked like always because Chase has always needed a little light, a little noise, doesn’t like it when things are too dark. As children, he was afraid of the dark, she remembers. In the days before they were old enough for it to be considered inappropriate, their parents would hold sleepovers for the whole mess of them, and it was always Chase asking for the door to be open, for the nightlight. Always everywhere except his own house. Where he was the quietest. Where he said so little. Where he nervously hushed them all night long when they got too loud.

Gert never figured out what he was worried about, why he acted like that, but she has ideas. Ideas that scorch in ways she doesn’t like so she doesn’t think too long or too hard about them. Besides, Victor Stein can’t find them here. None of their parents can.

She leans her head against the door and counts her breaths, tries to talk herself into or out of the next move, she’s not even sure. There are too many scenarios in her head, and they all coalesce and then spring apart before she can make sense of them. All she can think of is the look in his eyes when he told her he had always seen her. All she can think of is the way he kissed her back like he had been thinking of nothing else.  
All she can think of is the set of his mouth, shy, when he handed her the terrible Hanukkah sweater. 

It’s four in the morning, and she’s knocking, hesitantly, on the door of the guy she slept with a handful of days ago in a sweeping blistering wave of passion and then told him it was a one time thing even though all she wanted in that moment was for him to call her out on her lie. Which he didn’t. Which he wouldn’t. Because Chase looks at her like she is never wrong even when she is, even when she is to, admittedly, painful lengths. 

It’s four in the morning, and wonder of wonders, miracles of miracles there’s an answer on the other side of the door. “Yeah,” it’s Chase’s voice, quiet, full of sleep and shadows, with none of the hiding, none of the walls and appearances he works so hard on.

Gert forgets how to exist, and is convinced that her atoms expand until she is everywhere before she comes back to herself and pushes the door open enough that she can peer in. “Chase.” Her own voice sounds lost in the room, which is lit by several small LED lights flickering through various colors and patterns against the walls. 

Chase is sitting up, both hands over his face as though he is trying to put the mask back on, and Gert wants to reach out to catch his fingers, pull him away, tell him no, that he is enough just as he is, that he is everything, but instead she curls her hands into fists that she rests against her legs and tries not to look at him too hard. It takes a few long moments for him to become aware that it’s her in the room. When he does, there’s an obvious reaction, the way his shoulders tighten, a concern that lances right into his eyes. “Gert. Are you okay? Is Molly okay? What’s wrong?” He’s out of the bed before she can answer. He’s out of the bed before she can even process he is moving.

How is he so fast? How has the bubble of space that exists around her changed such that it feels like she is stuck in jelly, unable to properly move except in ludicrously slow motion? “Chase, no, it’s. I’m fine.” Liar. “She’s fine.” Liar. “Everything’s fine.” Liar. Nothing is fine. The world is not fine. The earth has been knocked off its orbit, and they exist in a strange, otherworldly space that they should not be able to inhabit. 

And her heart is a drumbeat in her chest that will not cease. Her heart is a chorus. Her heart is a line of music that she cannot sing because her voice is not good enough for it.

Before she knows what’s happening, she’s stuttering, words running rampant like a broken faucet, and she is gesticulating everywhere because her hands won’t still. “I’m really sorry. This was not a good idea. It’s the middle of the night. You’re sleeping. I’m just. I’m just gonna leave.” This is a different way the anxiety goes, the rushes and the ravings and the endless amounts of nervous energy, the conviction that she is wrong about anything and everything she does, what she says, what she thinks. What she feels. 

“Hey, hey,” Chase’s voice is slow, and she hates the romance novel cliche, but it is like honey; it flows over and around her, submerges her, thick and golden, suspended. “Hey, no, Gert. It’s okay.” His fingers are on her wrists running over the skin there to soothe but not actively trying to still her, to stop her, and she appreciates that, the grounding of the touch without the threat of restraint. “You’re okay.”

None of them are okay, she wants to tell him, but it’s harder when he is there, tall and broad, protective. Chase is safe. Chase has always been safe despite the pompous jock boys he hung around and the times he ditched plans with her for something else. Chase has always been safe even when he wasn’t talking to her. Something about Chase equates care as much as the gentle press of his fingers on her wrists and the light in his eyes. Gert takes a breath and tries to count to ten. One of his fingers is tapping against her skin, and she focuses on that, doesn’t know if he’s doing it purposefully to calm her or if it’s just him. It’s strange to think that Chase might also be nervous, but she can see the way the muscle in his jaw has tightened. 

“Sorry.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. It’s,” and then she shakes her head because no, she’s not. She’s not, and she’s tired of lying about it, exhausted of carrying it on her shoulders and in her mind and in every inch of her entirely too wound up body. “No,” she admits, and he just nods. 

“Yeah.” His eyes keep roving from hers to her mouth and then, sometimes, slightly lower, and she wonders if he’s looking at the sweater. “We should have. We should have thought about it. Your meds. That was stupid.” 

Somehow she can tell that he means he was stupid, and it’s unfair. This is not on him. At all. If anything, she feels calmer near him than she does anywhere else, which doesn’t make any damn sense considering. Considering all the unsaid things, all the will they won’t they of the situation. If this was happening in a television show she was watching, Gert would turn it off because it’s dumb and expected. If this was in a book, she would write a rant about it not being clever. She wants to be clever. She wants to be herself, fine alone.

Yet she also wants Chase.

Life is problematic. Nothing fits properly in boxes. Her heart feels stretched in thirteen directions, and her mind is swimming. But Chase’s fingers on her wrists are solid and steady. 

When he kisses her wrists one after the other, just a ghost of lips over skin, it feels like the world has ended in the best possible way, in waves of light.

“Sorry,” he murmurs the next moment, instantly, like he’s afraid he has done something unforgivable. He makes to move, and she hadn’t even realized how close he had gotten until he attempts to put more distance between them.

Instead, she grabs for his own wrist, can’t even get her fingers all the way around it, and tugs him back to her. “Don’t.”

“Don’t?” he asks, prods at something they both know she hasn’t finished, left hanging in the air, and it’s not Chase’s fault, the hesitancy. She was the one who told him it was a one-time thing. She was the one who basically planted her heel in the middle of his chest and pushed him as far away as she could manage. And yet he still looks at her like she is spun from gold, something out of a fairytale, something unattainable.

Your heart, she wants to tell him, is the only thing made of gold here, but those are words that Gert Yorkes cannot bring herself to say. Instead, she manages, “Don’t go,” and the smile on his face is the brightest thing she has ever seen in her life, which is saying something because Karo can turn into a sun-speckled galaxy. 

Chase slides his free hand into her hair, which is never tame or straight now, always wavy and on the verge of wild, roots showing. He slides his hand into her hair and through it to cup the back of her neck, and he looks. He just looks at her, and Gert thinks she could die from the emotion in his eyes alone, like what he’s seeing is everything he’s ever been looking for, and she debates reminding him of all the ways in which she doesn’t measure up to other people, in all the ways in which she’s deficient. Chase deserves soft. Chase deserves kind. 

Gert knows that girl, who feels tucked into a seashell at the depths of her, curled tight, tight like a bud that will never open. The world is harsh. The world is cold. The world needed combat boots and flyers and pamphlets and pepper spray. The world is hell. Their parents are murderers. And yet Chase still looks soft and perfect, looks at her like she is a dream. Molly’s parents died and Molly came to live with them, and Gert became her protector as well as her own. 

Maybe she should have fought harder to stay softer, but it hurt so much.

Chase rubs his thumb against the back of her neck even as he turns his hand in her grip to thread their fingers together. “I was only retreating when I thought you wanted me to.”

“Yeah, well, I’m an idiot. Don’t listen to me.” It’s automatic. Don’t look at me. Don’t listen to me.

He looks, possibly, even more injured. “Hey, don’t,” he says and steps even closer. The look in his eyes says that he will fight anything he can for her, even if it’s just her own doubts and insecurities, and Gert isn’t really sure how that’s gonna work out for either of them. She’s been waging that battle for years, and sometimes still loses. 

“What were you doing up?” he asks, and it could sound like someone uncomfortable floundering for something to say, maybe should sound like that considering how close they are, how she’s dressed in just this long sweater he gave her, and he’s only in sweatpants. Considering how she could easily lean forward and just press a kiss to his chest, but it’s not. Nothing is strained. Nothing is weird. Him touching her feels like the only thing in this odd space they inhabit that makes sense. 

“Checking to make sure that we’re not slowly sinking to our deaths.” There’s no humor in the way she laughs, the way her voice cracks, or the way her eyes glimmer a little with what feels like years of unshed tears.

“Gert.” It’s four in the morning and everything about Chase is soft and sleep-tousled. Even the way he says her name. Especially the way he leans down to press his forehead against hers and cups her cheek. “You can’t fix the world.”

She lets out a breath she didn’t even know she was holding and tells the truth in the way that happens in four in the morning even though the words stick in her throat. “Someone has to.”

“Someone,” he presses a kiss to her cheek, and she closes her eyes, “doesn’t always mean you. And it definitely doesn’t mean just you.” 

Her hand on his wrist has fallen away, and she has settled her fingers on his chest, though this time it is not a volcano, it is not lava running hot and liquid over every part of their bodies. It is slow heat, dipping your feet in a pool that has been warmed by the sun all day, the spreading warmth of a sip of whiskey flooding through your veins. “You going to help me?”

“Yes.” The way he says it sounds like a vow, like a promise, like a prayer. The way he says it skewers something deep inside of her such that it feels like she is bleeding out from some unseen wound. 

And then she is talking, words loosed, a deluge, flash flood, forest fire, every unstoppable natural disaster ever named. “I’m sorry. I didn't mean it. I didn’t want it to be a one-time thing. It wasn’t a one-time thing. It was. It was. I panicked. It was all I could do. Give you an out. Give me an out. Just. Stop it before it got too big, but it’s so big, Chase. It’s already so big. And I’m sorry. I just.” When she pulls back enough to look at him, Chase looks like someone turned a spotlight on inside of his eyes. “You’re not a one-time thing for me. You could never be a one-time thing for me.”

When he kisses her, time stops. When he kisses her, the countdown clock to tragedy inside her chest stops. When he kisses her, she kisses him back, slow, soft, comfortable. It’s not the hurried, mad rush of before, the energy cracking, the burning, undeniable need. This is different, like opening a door instead of crashing through a falling building. This is like coming home after a long, hard day and finding warmth, safety. Chase curls an arm around her waist while the other continues to hold her cheek like she is breakable. Gert Yorkes, once suspended for kicking someone hard enough with her combat boots that the bruises kept the guy off the lacrosse field, and she’s being held as gently as if she were a crystal goblet.

“I didn’t want you to be a one-time thing, either,” he says when they finally break apart, though he just leans his forehead to hers again, doesn’t move his hands, doesn’t pull away. “It just. It seemed like maybe I’d blown my chance.”

Gert would laugh if he didn’t sound so serious. That Chase Stein, golden, gold, glowing could ever have blown his chance with her. Silly. “No,” she says, though she can’t look at him. It’s hard to look at him when the only thing that seems to be in his eyes is her and something else, something that lurks in those pools and has a name that she isn’t sure she can stand to hear or see or acknowledge right now. Something heavy. Promises, vows, things she could ruin, things she could break. 

Chase is a fountain of feeling, it pours out of him. Gert is an underground river, hard to locate, liable to dry up if there isn’t enough rain. Sometimes it seems like he has too much, that she does not have enough. 

“I like your sweater,” he says, shyly, smirking, as though pretending he doesn’t know exactly where it came from. 

It’s silly, and it’s light, and it’s enough to get her to smile and stop. Just stop. From diving in and thinking too much and getting lost again. “Yeah? It’s pretty bitchin’, isn’t it?”

He settles both his hands on her face. “Just like the person it’s on.”

“Just like the person who picked it.”

They will have weird ways of expressing their affection, she knows. It’s okay, she knows. As long as they make sure the other understands.

Chase kisses her forehead, and it’s every bit as impactful as when they slept together. “Come on. It gets cold if you stand around outside of the covers too long, and I’m tired.” 

She follows him into the bed, and he curls around her, presses kisses to the nape of her neck. Even when his hand drifts under the hem of the sweater to brush fingers up her thigh it’s a comfort more than a quickening. Neither of them needs that right now. Right now they just need this, wound round and calm, steady, sure. Right before he falls asleep, moments before she does, he pulls her slightly closer, murmurs, “Lucky.”

“You or me?” she doesn’t know if he’ll hear the question.

“Me,” he says. “I got you.” 

Gert’s heart is flowers watered by that river, sixteen feet underground but rushing. 

Gert Yorkes is soft for two people and one dinosaur now. This addition doesn’t break her; it only makes her better.

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to find me on my [Tumblr](http://sarkastically.tumblr.com/) but it's a mishmash of things. Also, I have a public Spotify playlist under Yorkes/Stein that I listen to while writing things. Feel free to check it out. It's been a wip for, um, years and the songs cover a lot of versions of these two that exist in my head and various RP settings.


End file.
